Monday, August 31, 1998

Around the end or beginning of each month, we will have an online Squawk Engine planning meeting. Anyone can join, but you'll need to contact me for special instructions on how to connect to the meeting (It requires a telnet connection by the way.) I am using a Java chat server I created because it is accessible to more people (anyone who can telnet) than ICQ or IRC.

The first monthly Squawk Game Engine Online Planning Meeting will be Tuesday, September 1st (tomorrow!) from 1:00 pm to 5:00 pm PST (-8 GMT?)

In spite of the lack of news updates, various parts of this site have been updated especially the Wanted Models section. There are also some new messages at the Forum.

	Wednesday, August 19, 1998

OOPS! The link to download Fixed Cameras was actually pointing to Hack and Slash!

We need more people to work on publicity and programming. (We can always use programmers.) Check out the forum for information about helping with publicity.

	Tuesday, August 18, 1998

My Fixed Cameras Quake C patch has been added to the Games section. Imagine the dramatic camera angles of pre-rendered graphic adventure games combined with the real-time 3D action of Quake and the intense 3rd person play control of classic arcade shooters. It's hours of fun, and new levels are very easy to make

	Monday, August 17, 1998

Saturday, we had a meeting of the local Squawk engine development team - and about 8 people showed up - twice as many as I had originally invited! So we walked up to the park and had the meeting under some shady trees. The attendees included myself, Ulrich, Phil Gribbin, "Shockin" Shawn Geier, Mapes, MLGM, "Filcher" and "Atanas"

Most of these guys are artists; A few are level designers, modelers, aspiring programmers, and bid-nuss-men. At this point we don't have enough skilled programmers, which are very important right now while we are beginning to create the game engine.

In other news I have been tweeking the site, and I have added a new wanted model.

	Thursday, August 13, 1998

I have decided to turn the Squawk Massively Modifiable game engine into a a free, open source code, massively modifiable game engine. That's a lot of adjectives so I'm just calling it the Squawk Game Engine now :) (it's in the Games section of this site) As a show of good faith I have released my source code and binaries, although it doesn't do much yet. Download it here.

	Tuesday, August 11, 1998

Check out the new Forum for this site.

	Friday, August 7, 1998

I have added 2 new links that should help with Unreal modeling:

• Minor Nerve Damage - Questions and Answers about Unreal modeling
• Model Skinning and Importing for UNREAL

	Monday, August 3, 1998

Here are a couple of seemingly unrelated tidbits:

• Quake 3: Arena ("sequel" to the popular first-person shooters Quake and Quake 2) will not have a traditional single player story mode. Instead it will have deathmatch competition against "bots" of increasing skill.
• Ultima: Ascension (latest in a long series of computer role-playing games, also known as Ultima IX) will not have a "party" of characters, but your "companions" from previous Ultimas will be able to interact with you, go on their own journeys, or even follow you on specific quests.

The designers of these games are rethinking basic paradigms their games are built around. first-person shooters have always had single player adventures and the only Ultima game recently to not have a party of characters that follow you like robots was an experiment in arcade-style play control (which would actually have worked well with a party of characters if they had handled it like Secret of Mana or something but that's a whole different paradigm :)

Notice how deciding to eliminate an important part of the game creates new possibilities.

Without the traditional single player quest, Quake 3: Arena will have a different, fun kind of single-player experience. Is this "botmatching" fun? Most players think so - including players who don't play single player and players who don't play against other live players. I heard an estimate once that bots actually outnumber live multiplayer openents

By not having a party of characters in Ultima: Ascension, your companions are free to act in new ways, and you no longer have to keep them fed and equipped as you did in earlier games.

Imagine if we take these idea one step further:

• all characters follow a single set of rules
• You can play as any type of character in the game
• any type of character can be controlled by the computer or another player
• There are no weapons or other items that can only be used by player- or non-player characters
• There is no difference between a single player game and a multiplayer game
• There is no difference between a cooperative game and a teamplay or deathmatch game

Control over what each character can do and how each character can be controlled is entirely up to the game DESIGNER - not a programmer working on code that is difficult to modify if not set in stone. This is the essence of what I call "massively modifiable" game design. In fact it would probably be simpler to design a game to support many different styles of play by giving up these old paradigms at the beginning.

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